Oracle Blog

collected thoughts for no particular reason

Tuesday May 06, 2008

You’ve probably heard from some that structured metadata is what the Web really needs to evolve to the next level. “It’s all about the Semantic Web”. You’ve probably heard from others that structured metadata on the Web will never work because we’re all too lazy, too bad at spelling and too heavily infiltrated by crooks and spies. “It’s all about metacrap”. Who knows how that movie will end, but what I know is that we’ve quietly been putting structured metadata to work on our own little corner of the Web for years. Well, not always so quietly-- you might have heard of Sun’s SwoRDFish project. It’s a pioneering effort to use Web-friendly metadata, and specifically RDF to identify and describe Sun products across systems and departments. I found myself right at the center of things back when the project really gained legs back in 2003 or so, driving the effort to develop a shared taxonomy of products on the SwoRDFish system. That was about the time I became involved in CME and the maturing of Starlight, the main CMS for global sun.com Web sites.

Starlight needed a consistent way to tag pages related to products for a variety of reasons. A customer who follows a link to a Sun success story might learn that the Sun Fire X2200 M2 Server is an effective hardware platform for high-scale Web application architectures, and we want to make sure that they can find on that page well-updated information on that product. On the other hand, if a customer comes straight to a product feature page we want to make sure we make available just the tags for other standard pages associated with that product. We don’t want to have a downloads tab for a hardware product, so we’re concerned about identity and also general categorization of the product. Sun’s product Web pages use SwoRDFish identifiers and taxonomy to solve many such problems, and it’s become a crucial part of our machinery for dynamic page rendering.

The “By Product” tab uses selection by SwoRDFish IDs. If you hover your mouse over “Coolthreads” you’ll find the link is something like http://www.sun.com/customers/index.xml?p=8871f410-44cb-11da-ac39-080020a9ed93 . Yes, urn:uuid:8871f410-44cb-11da-ac39-080020a9ed93 is the SwoRDFish URI for the Coolthreads server product category. Clicking on it produces the generated landing page for all customer success stories that touch on that product category.

There is also useful separation of responsibility here. The product metadata and taxonomy is now maintained by experts on the SwoRDFish team, taking their input from product managers. This is general institutional knowledge that is used across Sun, and not just on the product marketing Web pages. Starlight queries SwoRDFish for the metadata, and makes this available for publishers to add capabilities such as “success story by product”. We have built some cool internal tools for content authors to navigate the SwoRDFish ontology to make tagging and publishing quick and simple.

SwoRDFish was definitely on the bleeding edge of things. We learned lots of lessons, and we’d all do things a bit differently if we were starting out now. For one thing, rather than using UUIDs URIs we’d use good old “http://”. We’re actually working on some things in that direction that I hope to be able to talk about more, soon. Perhaps we'll even get to the point of opening up the richness of our data and metadata to publishers, partners, and others outside Sun as well as inside. In this age we realize that our community is our most effective marketing arm. It’s certainly getting easier to carry the small-S semantic web message inside and outside Sun. Now that people see mashups everywhere they understand the importance of connecting the data behind Web sites, as well as linking pages. I definitely see a bright future for the marriage of sound document design and rich metadata design that’s fueled the success of Starlight to date. Sometimes the bleeding edge may cut you, but when it does take root, and proves its value so thoroughly, the satisfaction more than makes up for the scars.

Friday Apr 18, 2008

The most important step in refining data is writing down what makes it tick. In my last blog entry I outlined the process by which my team refined the data flow for Sun Web sites and mentioned Unified Product Data Model (UPDM). UPDM is a formal means for organizing the information for Sun web sites, with an emphasis on product data. The goal in developing UPDM was to reduce the redundancy and inefficiency in the data sets for the Starlight publishing platform, and then to extend the benefits to e-commerce sites, each of which happen to be hosted on different platforms.

UPDM provides definitions, basic business rules and relationships between facets of product data, including hierarchy, and attributes of each category, product and part. It’s maintained in a simple XML which can be transformed to HTML, spreadsheet, or even UML diagram. The following listing is a snippet from the actual core UPDM 1.0 model used in Starlight.

We developed UPDM 1.0 at a time when there were not as many good options for expressing such data models. RDF and XMI carried too much baggage, and we wanted something simple and clear, although RDF does play an important role in how things are bound together in the implementation, as I’ll discuss another day. Again we can generate all these other representations as needed. As an example the following picture is a UML class diagram generated from the XML above.

OK, a bit of an eye-chart. But, when you develop a broad data model such as UPDM its a real eye-opener, and you gain more than just the end product. You learn a lot about what business problems and business rules are not really well expressed anywhere, and are only to be found in someone’s head. Sometimes you learn about the key tensions between how different roles and departments interpret and process information.

To take one example, at Sun what we sell for hardware, the actual SKUs, are called “parts” in the marketing department, including e-commerce. In many other departments, and in a lot of the vendor software we use these are called “products”. We don’t really market at this level, though. We market the families of these such as “SunFire T2000”, and these are what we call “products” and what others call “product families”.

UPDM itself doesn’t provide any magic to reconcile such differences. It does provide the best you can hope for – a framework for writing down the knowledge so it’s open, shared, and even accessible through code. Then you have half a chance to build some magic on top of the model.

Sunday Mar 30, 2008

It’s been a while since I’ve written here. The key reason is that I’ve made a transition from Captain Data Modeler to directorship of Sun’s Content Management Engineering department. I suppose the nice message is that a lot of the hard work to balance good data architecture and practical business need is what put me on the radar for promotion. Of course the downside is that now I have to peer longingly over a desk piled high with budgets, vendor contracts, and HR priorities in order to catch a glimpse of the bits and bytes in the distance. I do miss those bits and bytes, and how they would always ground me in the comfort of tangible, creative deliverables. There are days when I’m a bit jealous of my engineering team who gets to dive in and immerse themselves in the bits and bytes every day. Ah well, business needs first.

But on the bright side I get to pull the lens back and take a broader look at how we use data on the Web to put our strategies to work. In the past whirlwind year and a half I’ve overseen data flows from legacy data stores, ERP, isolated data silos and files from all sorts of footlockers and broom closets, and I’ve had to conduct that data into new Web site venues and features, low and high-volume e-commerce, unification of product documentation, community sites like BigAdmin, developer resource sites, and much, much more. The first thing that occurs to me, sitting at this lookout point, is that Sun has so much information that we somehow manange to squeeze outside our firewall through various tiny slits. We’re certainly ahead of the marketplace in opening up data to serve customers and partners, but we can do more, and I’m working to see that we do.

We all know that it’s now a much more collaborative marketplace, thanks to the Web. At Sun our marketplace contains some of the best brains in technology, and if we could open up more information in forms that they could easily digest, the possibilities are endless. The most obvious thing we need to provide is more Web feeds, in Atom and RSS, and it would be nice if we offered more data in JSON form, which is now one of the preferred inputs for mash-ups. In general we’d like to provide more content and data in source data formats such as well-defined XML and JSON. Right now too much of what we provide is in presentation formats such as HTML and PDF. And, in some cases, it is still all rolled up with the business rules that govern its current use.

But to get where you’re going it helps to remember where you’ve come from. I think data architecture for Sun’s Web content, while not perfect, is in pretty good shape to expand its usage as ambitiously as I want. There are some interesting lessons in how we tamed the data to that extent. I gave a presentation at XML 2007 (my co-presenter Uche Ogbuji was not able to make it for unfortunate personal reasons), covering some of the work we’d done to in data architecture, and focusing on some of the lessons learned for managing collections of XML. The presentation was very well received, and that gives me the impression that we’re ahead of the curve in what we’ve accomplished behind the scenes, and that this doesn’t manifest enough in what you see on Sun’s Web sites. My experience at XML 2007 encouraged me to discuss such things more often here, not just some of the neat things we’re doing inside the firewall, but more on how we plan to put to the service of Sun’s customer’s, Sun’s community and partners, and ultimately Sun’s strategy.